You get what you pay for.

That’s not the exact wording, but it is essentially the message Enumclaw firefighters are sending in hopes that voters approve a proposition on the special ballot this April. What Enumclaw tax dollars have purchased in recent years are slow response times to critical calls. The local firefighter association and Fire Chief Randy Fehr say the fire department failed to respond immediately to 328 calls to 911 during 2015.

“We had instances over the Easter holiday weekend and we had response times to EMS calls that were 17 and 18 minutes. And these were a few block away from our headquarters,” Fehr said. “That was because our firefighters were already assigned to another emergency.”

In essence, Enumclaw firefighters have been triaging the 911 calls, essentially creating a waiting list for emergencies.

“Many of them can be life-threatening calls,” Fehr said. “There is no way to schedule to have one of our citizens call us and tell us that they will have a heart attack or respiratory distress. We can’t say that while on a call, ‘Can you reschedule your car wreck for 40 minutes later?'”

The situation in Enumclaw has degraded because the department is strapped for cash, Fehr says. It operates on $3.1 million each year to run three fire stations that cover 56 square miles and serve 19,000 people. The department is currently operating on a $316,000 budget deficit. To add fuel to the financial fire, the department faces $1.1 million in capital expenditures over the next five years. Firefighters are keeping an eye on an aging 300-year-old engine, as well as a 21-year-old aid unit. There are also 31 pieces of breathing equipment that need to be replaced, yet there is no money to do so.

This comes after the fire district attempted to garner voter approval in 2013 for a levy lid lift, which failed. The fire district responded by laying off firefighters. Since then, the department’s volume of 911 calls have increased by 33 percent.

It all adds up to the slow response times, according to Fehr, who says they are doing the best with the resources at hand. Those resources equate to placing hundreds of 911 calls on hold, the majority of which are medical emergencies.

“The way we staff out here, we can effectively run one call at a time,” he said. “More frequently we have multiple 911 calls coming in at a time and we are not able to immediately respond to them.

“In many instances it can be lives saved,” Fehr added. “The shorter the response time, and we can help somebody sooner, the better the outcome for them.”

The lack of resources also means that when calls pile up, neighboring fire districts sometimes pitch in to take on the load. Fehr said that those districts can’t always get there quickly.

Proposition 1 could provide funding for the financially starved fire department and would mean the department won’t have to lay off a third of its personnel. It is a 48-cent increase on the current levy, which Fehr notes is the lowest of all the neighboring fire districts &#8212 it would go from $1.02 to $1.50. It means that a homeowner with a $200,000 property would pay $18 a year, and a $300,000 property would pay $37.50.

“This levy is going to be decided by our customers, our taxpayers,” Fehr said. “They have to decide what level of service is acceptable to them.”